[adlorger]

PJ O'Rourke was my first into to a feeling that I've become more familiar with over the years - "liberal cringe"

I still count myself as a liberal (more classical than modern) these days but I can't help but view a lot of standard progressive empty promises through an O'Rourke-ian lens.

[aklemm]

I'm curious what you mean by "empty promises"? If it's what I hope it means, those are things I experience as thwarted dreams instead.

[munificent]

One of the defining properties of liberals and, even more, progressives is idealism. The idea that you set your sights on a destination that is unattainable due to the vagaries of reality rather settle for status quo and incrementalism.

There is an adaptive and maladaptive side to that psychology.

The adaptive side is that all plans tend to work out at less than 100%. If you aspire to something just past your destination, you may actually reach where you originally wanted to go. If you aim right for it, you'll fall short. Also, reality doesn't always make it clear where the real boundaries are. Often you can accomplish more than is apparently possible if you have the courage to try.

The maladaptive side is considering any policy too coupled to reality as stinking of compromise and defeatism, or as a designed-to-fail Trojan horse from the other side. Any idea that might actually be feasible instead becomes suspect by virtue of its feasibility. The only goals you feel comfortable holding in your heart are ones that never risk getting sullied by any actual incremental progress.

I think progressives in the past used to be better at keeping their eyes on the future while getting their hands dirty with today's work. But, perhaps because of decades of horror shows like the War in Iraq, climate change, rising inequality, corporate take-over of culture, and political polarization, I see less of the latter. There's a sort of fatalism of prefering to die a martyr with hands unstained by sin than possibly staving off death by consorting with the enemy.

[aklemm]

It seems to me the fatalism comes from the game-theory side of it; when your enemy has no ideals except beating you, his diabolical tactics really undermine morale.

[pdonis]

>One of the defining properties of liberals and, even more, progressives is idealism.

If you mean idealism as a way of conducting your personal life, I don't think it has anything to do with any particular political persuasion.

If you mean idealism as a political philosophy, while I agree this is a defining property of progressives, for liberals, at least the classical liberals that were the original referent of the term, no. (Today "liberal" pretty much means the same thing politically as "progressive", but that wasn't always the case.) Classical Enlightenment liberalism was highly suspicious of idealism as a guiding principle of politics and public policy, because it recognized the limitations of humans. We are simply not smart enough to come up with useful idealism on the scale of a country. Every time we try, it causes far more problems than it solves. Classical liberals preferred to let institutions on a larger scale evolve from the bottom up, as people exercised their individual freedom of choice on a smaller scale and were held accountable by the people they interacted with.

[TomSwirly]

> possibly staving off death by consorting with the enemy.

The Democrats have tried to "consort with the enemy" for three decades now, and all that happens is that the Republicans move further to the right and laugh at them.

[munificent]

This is the iterated prisoner's dilemma of modern US politics.

If you compromise and cooperate with the other party, some fraction of time you will make progress, and some fraction of time you'll get screwed because they're cooperation was a bad-faith trap.

It's certainly the case that at least since New Gingrich the odds of the former have grown much higher when Democratic politicians try to work with Republicans.

[rootusrootus]

> Newt Gingrich

I think history will look back and see that Newt Gingrich shares a disproportionately large share of the blame for the tribal politics we are experiencing now. He wasn't first, but he was effective.

[dragonwriter]

> I think history will look back and see that Newt Gingrich shares a disproportionately large share of the blame for the tribal politics we are experiencing now.

Much as I loath Gingrich, I think that the blame for transformation of political culture that he has gotten really from day one of his speakership is overblown, and that the two main factors are:

(1) the reversion to the normal alignment of partisan and ideological divides as the long era of the overlapping realignments of the post-Depression era (New Deal and Civil Rights) and,

(2) Clinton’s political triangulation strategy reducing opportunity for partisan differentiation on a wide range of high-saliency policy issues, driving a focus on personal and culture war issues as well as a rightward policy shift to re-enable differentiation on those issues (which itself required relying on personal and cultural identity politics heavily.)

Gingrich, was a problem, to be sure, but there is always a Gingrich around (many of them), but he became successful when he did because both structural forces and choices by the other party created an environment in which his approach would be rewarded.

[aklemm]

Exactly. One prize of playing diabolically is you get to apply a double standard to your opponent. Works great for them.

[munificent]

> Works great for them.

For a while. It's easy to win by playing the villain in a single round prison's dilemma, but less so when iterated.

[AtlasBarfed]

I'm an environmentalist. Let me tell you about empty promises from the big-Ds...

Edit: to keep it in theme with PJ and the article, where PJ says that politicians always want wars on X because it's the only way to get people to move in a direction and they get to wield a baton... Of course such "wars" are only fought because someone makes money regardless of winner or loser, or they aren't really wars. Global Warming? Now THAT'S a war. You know it is, because it is ignored.

It's not generally what the parent means though, they probably meant essentially the powers of the Ds just virtue signal to get votes or rely on the comically evil other side to scare up votes, but never really work for a better welfare state, healthcare/benefits, equality, or the like.

The Biden administration is already a classic example. They could play hardball to get the votes, rein in Manchin, and other techniques. Instead, those minor hurdles are treated as unsolvable barriers and the status quo is maintained.

Because where is Biden from? Same place Obama was: the corporate arm / Democratic Leadership Council. Obama never prosecuted the mortgage crisis, never pursued breaking up the megabanks and monopolies, setup the internment camps for the refugees at our border, used drone assassinations, didn't get out of Iraq/Afghanistan, etc etc etc.

The only thing Obama did well IMO was spur investment in solar and wind, but that may have been an technological evolutionary inevitability. And maybe Obamacare, the right hated it so much it must have some good stuff in it.

"After I broke the news to him that his embedded Atlantic editor and good friend, Michael Kelly, perished on the charge to Baghdad when his Humvee was fired upon and crashed into a canal, I watched P.J. hunt-and-peck out an appreciation of Kelly on my borrowed laptop, tears in his eyes, scotch by his side, but never losing his cool. He peered in on the TV action – Iraqis looting their country like there was an all-you-can-steal fire sale – as he played the faux optimist, cracking, “This will eventually evolve into shopping.” " Goddamn is that funny.

[rpmisms]

Promises that sound nice, but have huge economic consequences and therefore wouldn't be passed by a sane government. An example: Medicare for All combined with amnesty for illegal immigrants. It sounds nice, until you think about the obvious result.

[darkarmani]

> amnesty for illegal immigrants. It sounds nice, until you think about the obvious result.

You mean because of the sizable labor black market would shrivel up and suddenly all of these laborers would be able to collect on benefits on the taxes they've paid on the system? there is a good question there.

What is the approximate size of benefits that are getting funded but lie unclaimed by black market labor?

[rpmisms]

Don't take me out of context and then demand I defend a strawman. I clearly referred to the combination of amnesty and public healthcare as expensive, not one or the other. The bottom 50% of the country by income, which by-and-large black market labor falls under, pay less than 3% of federal taxes. That's not going to fund very much.

[rootusrootus]

It seems like the natural conclusion is that the US health system is inadequate to the task of providing health care for every citizen. Some portion of the population has to do without.

That sounds uncharitable, yes. But the same contingent that claims we cannot feasibly support universal healthcare due to the bottom 50% being essentially leeches on society happens to be the same people who insist that we cannot improve income for the bottom 50% because the free market is speaking.

[rpmisms]

There are solutions to Healthcare that do not involve a single-payer solution. Namely, targeted deregulation to allow meaningful competition. Shorten the IP window for pharma companies. Allow startups to move fast and break the system.

[e40]

Or "forgive all student loans" ... (I believe we should immediately reset the interest rates to 0 or some slightly larger nominal value, and immediately close all loans that have paid more than the original principle) ... but I don't know how this works to just forgive all of them.

[rootusrootus]

The problem with forgiving the loans is not economic. It would be trivial to do, and the economic consequences probably positive.

It is a moral hazard. First, it amounts to a giveaway to people aren't necessarily all that sympathetic -- people who can afford to go to college at all, even if they borrowed money to do it. Remember how much of the population couldn't even get that far. Second, any kind of student debt jubilee without first reforming the system just invites every future student to take as many loans as possible with the expectation that they too will have their debt forgiven.

[Thrymr]

Sure we could. We "forgive" lots of debts in bankruptcy proceedings already, but student loans have a high bar discharge in bankruptcy. Historically debt forgiveness has a long history, as David Graeber and others have shown:

https://novaramedia.com/2021/08/30/david-graeber-was-right-a...

[e40]

Yes, I know we could. This sums up my thoughts better than I could:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30533995

[rpmisms]

Yeah, it's an economic absurdity. I agree with you, your proposal is very fair.

[TomSwirly]

> Yeah, it's an economic absurdity.

Again, can you show us the numbers? "A guy claimed it was so on the Internet" isn't really useful later as a source.

[rpmisms]

Sure. According to https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/, there's $1.75t in outstanding student loan debt in the US. You can just print the money and contribute to the huge inflation the Fed is already wrangling, but that's a very short-sighted move.

[mgkimsal]

I'm not sure what the 'obvious result' is.

[rpmisms]

Massive spending as people flock in to get healthcare. It's (sadly) not financially feasible.

[aklemm]

That assumes the immigrants don't become part of the tax-paying economy, which they have a great record of doing.

[rpmisms]

Will they become high earners? The vast majority of taxes are paid by high earners and the wealthy, with those making under ~$43,600 a year—50% of Americans—paying just 3% of income taxes. (Source: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...)

[TomSwirly]

By my calculations, you are way off.

Giving free healthcare to all the illegal immigrants would cost $100 billion; switching the single payer would save Americans a trillion.

> It sounds nice, until you think about the obvious result.

Making up a nice story isn't really "thinking". Let's see your actual numbers.

[rpmisms]

> Giving free healthcare to all the illegal immigrants would cost $100 billion; switching the single payer would save Americans a trillion.

> Making up a nice story isn't really "thinking". Let's see your actual numbers.

Let's see yours. Trusting a politician's estimate for a bureaucrat's dream money pit is naivete at its peak.

According to this article: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/01/416416/single-payer-system..., savings of 3.5% are likely in the first year of a single payer plan.

Edit: according to Bernie Sanders' plan, the total cost would be $32 trillion over 10 years. Here's a nice article debunking that claim: https://www.factcheck.org/2018/08/the-cost-of-medicare-for-a...